Talk by Jason Cons (Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin)

Delta Futures explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta’s imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh’s southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see its rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. This talk, and the book upon which it is based, explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits. These future visions produce the delta as a “climate frontier,” a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta’s climate-affected future.

Jason Cons is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Delta Futures (University of California Press, 2025) and Sensitive Space (University of Washington Press, 2016). He is the co-editor of Frontier Assemblages (Wiley) and is a member of the Limn editorial collective and an outgoing editor of South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies.

This presentation is supported by a grant from the Central New York Humanities Corridor